composition can predict how well a team
coordinates, communicates and resolves
conflicts above and beyond what might
be predicted based on individual team
member characteristics.

“It’s not just a matter of us taking the
four or five most individually capable
individuals and assuming that’s going to
make a good team for a three-year mission
in that type of isolated, confined and
extreme environment,” Tannenbaum says.
“For example, can you imagine a team
that’s made up of all very strong challengers
who tend to question a lot of things?
Nothing would ever get done. But similarly,
having a team that has none of them is a
problem as well.”

Phelan Ebenhack/Silver Image

Supporting team success

Even once a balanced team is put together,
the capsule’s close quarters and lack of
privacy could still lead to cooperation,
coordination and communication
problems for the astronauts, Kozlowski
says. While a curt interaction among team
members after a rough night’s sleep might
seem minor at the time, research has
shown that being the target of rudeness
can drain a person’s cognitive resources
and make it more difficult for him or her
to stay focused.

“A spat with one team member can lead
to isolation or depression, and can affect
not just the interactions with that team member but between all
team members,” Kozlowski says.

How often will the team face such issues and how will
they recover? Kozlowski and his colleagues are studying the
dynamics of NASA teams living in environments such as
Antarctica, which is similar to the extreme space environment
the Mars team will face. They’re also working with a group of
engineers to develop a wireless “badge” that astronauts would
wear to monitor team collaboration and cohesion while the
Mars team is in transit.

The badges would have motion detection built in and could
monitor which astronaut approached the other, as well as
the vocal intensity, heart rate and face-time distance between
other sensor-wearing team members. “From that, we might
infer that there was an argument or altercation, and then we
could monitor subsequent interactions more closely, provide
the crew with feedback and alert the ground crew if necessary,”
Kozlowski says.

Salas’s team is focused on helping astronauts be more aware
of their interactions with others and manage conflict while

Dr. Eduardo Salas’s team is focused on helping astronauts be more aware of their
interactions with others and manage conflict while in orbit.

in orbit. The key, according to psychological research, is that
people can learn to work more effectively together. According to
a Salas-led 2008 meta-analysis of 2,650 teams, team training can
improve a team’s performance by nearly 20 percent (Human
Factors, 2008).

Salas and his team are using their NASA funding to
develop, implement and evaluate interventions to maximize
space crew cohesion and mitigate negative psychosocial
effects of long-duration missions, as well as measure crew
cohesion over time. They’re focused on identifying stressors
among spaceflight crews — such as lack of space and privacy
— and working to pinpoint strategies, such as team self-correction and regulation, to help astronauts cope with such
stressors during the mission. The astronauts will learn these
strategies along with their more traditional technical training
and anti-gravity acclimation.

“It’s really about setting the conditions that lead to success,”
he says. n